Views from the Margins

What does it mean to be French? What constitutes “Frenchness”? Is it birth, language, attachment to republicanism, adherence to cultural norms? In contemporary France, these questions resonate in light of the large number of non-French and non-European immigrants, many from former French colonies, who have made France home in recent decades. Historically, French identity has long been understood as the product of a centralized state and culture emanating from Paris that was itself central to European history and civilization. Likewise, French identity in terms of class, gender, nationality, and religion mainly has been explained as a strong, indivisible core, against which marginal actors have been defined.

This collection of essays offers examples drawn from an imperial history of France that show the power of the periphery to shape diverse and dynamic modern French identities at its center. Each essay explains French identity as a fluid process rather than a category into which French citizens (and immigrants) are expected to fit. In using a core/periphery framework to explore identity creation, Views from the Margins breaks new ground in bringing together diverse historical topics from politics, religion, regionalism, consumerism, nationalism, and gendered aspects of civic and legal engagement.
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Views from the Margins

What does it mean to be French? What constitutes “Frenchness”? Is it birth, language, attachment to republicanism, adherence to cultural norms? In contemporary France, these questions resonate in light of the large number of non-French and non-European immigrants, many from former French colonies, who have made France home in recent decades. Historically, French identity has long been understood as the product of a centralized state and culture emanating from Paris that was itself central to European history and civilization. Likewise, French identity in terms of class, gender, nationality, and religion mainly has been explained as a strong, indivisible core, against which marginal actors have been defined.

This collection of essays offers examples drawn from an imperial history of France that show the power of the periphery to shape diverse and dynamic modern French identities at its center. Each essay explains French identity as a fluid process rather than a category into which French citizens (and immigrants) are expected to fit. In using a core/periphery framework to explore identity creation, Views from the Margins breaks new ground in bringing together diverse historical topics from politics, religion, regionalism, consumerism, nationalism, and gendered aspects of civic and legal engagement.
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Views from the Margins

Views from the Margins

Views from the Margins

Views from the Margins

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Overview


What does it mean to be French? What constitutes “Frenchness”? Is it birth, language, attachment to republicanism, adherence to cultural norms? In contemporary France, these questions resonate in light of the large number of non-French and non-European immigrants, many from former French colonies, who have made France home in recent decades. Historically, French identity has long been understood as the product of a centralized state and culture emanating from Paris that was itself central to European history and civilization. Likewise, French identity in terms of class, gender, nationality, and religion mainly has been explained as a strong, indivisible core, against which marginal actors have been defined.

This collection of essays offers examples drawn from an imperial history of France that show the power of the periphery to shape diverse and dynamic modern French identities at its center. Each essay explains French identity as a fluid process rather than a category into which French citizens (and immigrants) are expected to fit. In using a core/periphery framework to explore identity creation, Views from the Margins breaks new ground in bringing together diverse historical topics from politics, religion, regionalism, consumerism, nationalism, and gendered aspects of civic and legal engagement.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780803218765
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication date: 01/01/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 585 KB

About the Author


Kevin J. Callahan is associate professor of history at Saint Joseph College. His articles have appeared in Peace and Change and International Review of Social History. Sarah A. Curtis is associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling and Society in Nineteenth-Century France.

Contributors: Kevin J. Callahan, Sarah A. Curtis, Anne Epstein, Rachel G. Fuchs, Samuel Huston Goodfellow, Stephen L. Harp, Sean M. Quinlan, Jeremy Rich, and Lee Whitfield.

Table of Contents

Introduction Kevin J. Callahan Sarah A. Curtis 1

1 Missionary Utopias: Anne-Marie Javouhey and the Colony at Mana, French Guiana, 1827-1848 Sarah A. Curtis 21

2 Marcel Lefebvre in Gabon: Revival, Missionaries, and the Colonial Roots of Catholic Traditionalism Jeremy Rich 53

3 Marketing in the Metropole: Colonial Rubber Plantations and French Consumerism in the Early Twentieth Century Stephen L. Harp 84

4 Exorcising Algeria: French Citizens, the War, and the Remaking of National Identity in the Rhone-Alpes, 1954-1962 Lee Whitfield 108

5 Autonomy or Colony: The Politics of Alsace's Relationship to France in the Interwar Era Samuel Huston Goodfellow 135

6 The "True" French Worker Party: The Problem of French Sectarianism and Identity Politics in the Second International, 1889-1900 Kevin J. Callahan 158

7 Sex and the Citizen: Reproductive Manuals and Fashionable Readers in Napoleonic France, 1799-1808 Sean M. Quinlan 189

8 Gender and the Creation of the French Intellectual: The Case of the Revue de Morale Sociale, 1899-1903 Anne R. Epstein 218

9 Family Dramas: Paternity, Divorce, and Adultery, 1917-1945 Rachel G. Fuchs 251

The Writings of William B. Cohen 273

Contributors 276

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